My son Racer is four. He can wipe his own butt, but demands that some one do it for him. And by demand, I mean he screams from the second floor for some one to come and clean his keister.

It’s become a family joke. We’ve tried to get Hunter to take on the task as part of his weekly chores ($5 a week to wipe your brother’s buttocks!), but despite his addiction to Pokemon, he refuses to decontaminate Racer’s derrière. 9 times out of 10 the task falls to me to fix his fanny. Finally I decided to immortalize the ritual for you to enjoy.

Last year my wife made the boys some serious Halloween costumes. Hunter was Batman with a Batmobile made of cardboard boxes and Racer was a construction worker driving a steamroller (also made of cardboard). The level of detail that went into these costumes is amazing. The reaction from people when we went trick-or-treating was awesome. The smiles on peoples faces were priceless.

This year for the Ford Blog we wanted to write a post about DIY Halloween costumes for people who love cars, and so who better to help with the post then my wife!

For the post we choose three costumes: Ken Block, an air freshener and Steve McQueen from Bullitt. Odile, who manages the Ford Quebec blog created her own Ken Block costume, while my wife took on the air freshener and Bullitt costumes.

The air freshener was a couple of hours of work – tracing the pattern, cutting out the tree, painting it and then adding the labels. The 1968 Mustang from Bullitt, however, took a couple of days.

Made from two large cardboard boxes, she worked day and night for four days constructing the car. Details like the backend, the headlights and the chrome work really put the car over the top. It truly amazes me what she can do.

One of the things that we have been very adamant about is that our boys should know how to swim. Hunter has been in swimming lessons since he was 3 (he is now 5) and Racer started when he was 2 (he is now 3). They have been in back to back sessions ever since and they both can swim. Hunter can swim the length of the pool and dive, while Racer has recently hit his stride.

In the fall, Hunter completed the daytime swim program and was ready to move onto the more advanced program offered in the evening, despite being a year younger than the generally accepted age for the program.

In January we enrolled Hunter in the evening program. What a shock. In the daytime there are only a few students. At night there were multiple classes with a large number of kids in each class. This was to be expected. The shocking part was the quality of the teachers.

The evening program is run by teenagers. They seemed more interest in chatting with each other rather than teaching. The instructor seemed to focus on helping one student, not the class, and we counted that Hunter had a total of 8 turns during the half hour class. While this is bad, what’s worse is that they held him while swimming to keep him afloat. This would be fine if they were trying to teach form, but this was not the case.

By the end of the class we were so disappointed that we went home and switched him back to the daytime program.

Take swimming lessons during the day

From my perspective, the best advice I can give you is to enrol your child in swimming lessons during the day, not the night. The teachers are more mature and there are less students. My second piece of advice is to keep them in lessons, back-to-back, it’s the best way for them to learn.

Our boys ability to swim are a direct result of these two things, along with my wife’s dedication to getting the boys to class.